The world has seen unparalleled pressure put on the public sector to improve the speed and quality of service delivery, whilst simultaneously employing measures to cut the costs. South Africa and the Eastern Cape have not been immune to this as there have been complaints and demonstrations from various national and provincial stakeholders demanding more and improved services. The Department of Economic Development, Environmental Affairs and Tourism (DEDEAT) in particular has employed the services of public entities in its quest to realise government’s socio-economic developmental objectives and ease some of the service delivery pressures. These agencies are unfortunately struggling to deliver and the Department is unable to play the oversight role it is legislatively mandated to carry out. The main reason for this seem to be the lack of the capacity to objectively track and measure the performance of these agencies. As they say “you cannot manage what you cannot measure”. This is despite the fact that there is a shareholders’ compact and many other measures in place to enable performance monitoring. Also, the public sector is known to have inherent and unique performance management challenges like broad and vague objectives which lead to too many measurements, a propensity to focus on the “easy to measure” but often irrelevant indicators at the expense of critical outcomes and a short-term orientation that is usually fuelled by political expediency. Against this background, this study sought to make use of a comprehensive and dynamic performance monitoring framework, namely the Balanced Scorecard (BSC), to explore its potential use in assisting government to monitor the performance of public agencies, in particular the Development Finance Institutions (DFI) in South Africa. The proposed framework helps government to focus on the performance drivers of future value, and what decisions and actions are necessary to achieve critical outcomes. The aim of the study therefore is to develop an adjusted BSC framework to monitor the activities of a public sector agency and thus demonstrate how a BSC framework could be used to monitor a public agency by the government department. The study is evaluative in nature and is divided into three sections. Section one is presented as an Evaluation Report. It sets the scene, discusses briefly the key theoretical concepts, outlines the research methods used and presents the findings followed by a discussion and recommendations. Section two delves into the literature in more detail, providing a more extensive review of the literature that informed the investigation, whilst section three provides a more extensive description of the research methodology employed in the study. To achieve the aims of the study, the research drew from the work of various authors in the field including that of Bigliardi, Dormio and Galati, 2011; Bititci, Garengo, Dörfler, and Nudurupati, 2012; Julyan, 2011; Kaplan and Norton, 1992, 1993, 1996, 2001, 2004 and 2006; Niven, 2003 and 2008 and Northcott and Taulapapa, 2012. Also, five BSC perspectives - including the programme specific “equity” perspective - were used to develop an interview schedule. These were used to formulate the key performance objectives and indicators, based on the stakeholder’s responses. These respondents have experience within the programme as administrators, beneficiaries and funders. The research employed purposive sampling with semi-structured in-depth interviews and document analysis as primary and secondary instruments for data collection. In essence, five officials from the agency, one from DEDEAT and two co-operatives participated in the research. The results indicate a general appreciation of and gravitation towards outcome based measures, even though the government culture of focusing on outputs is still prevalent. The results of the study indicated that, generally, a government - public agency BSC based performance monitoring framework would have the following features:  Customer objectives and programme mission as the main goal and this will provides clarity at all levels on who the customers are and what are their primary requirements.  Clear, visible and stringent financial controls as the agency is administering public resources.  Few carefully selected processes and systems that have a direct and positive impact on the customer objectives. Deliberate and consistent efforts to promote the participation of designated groups in the economy of the country.  Comprehensive indicators on capacity building as “mission based-organisations rely heavily on skills, dedication and alignment of staff”. Overall, the study concludes that the make-up of the BSC is beneficial to the public sector and in monitoring the public sector agencies for the following reasons:  It helps the agency to focus on customers and their needs.  It forces the agency to engage and communicate strategic intention with both internal and external stakeholders and thus synchronize competing stakeholder needs.  It forces the agency to limit the number of indicators and therefore select the few value adding measures that are aligned to customer outcomes.  Through its cause and effect relationship, the agency is compelled to align all the resources, activities and processes to the main goal of the entity. All these help to minimize the principal agent problem, as the use of the BSC can bring clarity on strategy and expectations, provided it is supported with regular communication.

The focus of the study is to investigate the factors that impact on effective implementation of a performance management system at the South African Social Security Agency (SASSA) in the Eastern Cape Region, Nelson Mandela Metro District. It is said that an organisational success in service delivery largely depends on the efficiency and effectiveness of its employees in undertaking their functions, duties and responsibilities (Ntombela, Mpehle and Penciliah, 2010: 63).

This thesis is focused mainly on performance measures of open-end mutual funds and analysis of selected funds with long track record (periods 1995-2013 or 2000-2013) available for individual investors in the Czech Republic. In the first part of the thesis, evolution of Czech collective investment business is described. Among traditional risk focused approaches, this thesis describes also less common approaches taking investors' psychology into account -- for example measurement of stress or net utility based on Loss Aversion theory. In the analytical part, the role of additional costs (e.g. entry fee or taxes) is emphasized as these additional costs are usually out of any consideration when measuring the performance. The results show that these additional costs may have significant impact on returns recorded by the investor. In the Czech asset management industry, we usually experience presentation of returns only -- without stress of risks or other factors, risk focused measurements are rarely displayed in funds' performance presentation.

Effective maintenance planning is essential and important in any organisation that is responsible for procuring and managing complex assets. In the marine shipping industry maintenance planning is very significant due to its complexity and the obligations on shipping organisations to comply with certain regulations and requirements. Moreover, improper planning can reduce the ship's availability, which may in turn, be reflected in the revenue of the company. Another issue that requires attention in this field is the cost of maintenance, since improper or inadequate planning could result in breakdowns that could increase the cost of maintenance.This research aims to identify the key factors that affect ship maintenance planning and to provide a framework that can help the decision maker to identify and choose optimum decisions regarding ship maintenance. The research is divided into four stages in order to achieve its objectives and to address the research problem.The first stage is the review of the literature to identify the need for maintenance and to select the key factors that affect maintenance planning. The findings indicate that: maintenance scheduling, selection of maintenance strategy, ship construction, crew compensation, and shipyard selection are the most important factors.The second stage is to evaluate maintenance performance measurements for the marine shipping industry by conducting case study and interviews with professionals involved in the mercantile industry. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with six senior staff experts from three different organisations. The results show that: dry docking scheduling, maintenance costs and budgets, customer satisfaction, employees' satisfaction, classification requirements, and the ship's maintenance requirements are the main factors that have great influence on maintenance planning.The third stage is to develop new methodology to measure the maintenance performance in the marine shipping organisation which is the ship maintenance performance measurement (SMPM) framework. The developed method was validated to assist managers in making the right decisions in ship maintenance planning. The framework was developed based on ten thematic criteria that can be used as indicators for potential organisation growth, i.e., maintenance strategy; dry docking scheduling; budget and costs; the ship's equipment; customer satisfaction; employees; health, safety and environment; learning and growth; classification requirements; and the ship's operation and demands requirements. Interviews were conducted with key personnel from the Kuwait Oil Tanker Company (KOTC) to validate the framework.The fourth stage demonstrates that an optimised schedule for the dry docking of ships for routine maintenance has been constructed. This is accomplished on the basis of one measured criterion, dry docking scheduling, by using an integer programming model to maximise the ship's availability within the company fleet. The model is defined by three constraints: the maintenance window, maintenance completion, and the ship's limit. The model was validated using data from KOTC, and the results depict an optimum solution for maintenance scheduling, maximising the ship's availability to 100% and not less than 92%.

Dagens applikationer hanterar mer och mer data vilket resulterar i att de blir allt mer resurskrävande och kräver mer av hårdvaran. Vilket i förlängningen kan innebär att hårdvaran måste bytas ut med jämna mellanrum för att kunna köra mjukvaran på ett för användaren tillfredsställande sätt. Detta arbete undersöker om det genom att byta designteknik är möjligt att utveckla mindre resurskrävande applikationer. Arbetet presenterar en jämförelse mellan objektorienterad design (även kallad objektorienterad programmering, OOP) och data orienterad design (DOD). Detta genom att dels ta upp kända för- och nackdelar med respektive designteknik samt genom att utföra en mätning på respektive teknik. Det som anses vara de främsta fördelarna med OOP är återanvändning av kod, att koden är lätt att underhålla, säkerhet i form av inkapsling samt att objekten som används reflekterar den mänskliga verkligheten. Dessa fördelar är dock även något som bidrar till det som anses vara den främsta nackdelen med OOP, nämligen att den är prestandakrävande. När det gäller DOD så anses de främsta fördelarna vara att det medför en cachevänligare kod som leder till färre cachemissar. Det anses även vara lättare att parallellisera koden i jämförelse med OOP. Den nackdelen som tas upp med DOD är att de tar tid att lära sig och kräver en del övning. Dock är DOD väldigt okänt vilket resulterade i ett svagt underlag. Två simuleringar utvecklades i Unity varav den ena använder sig av den nya teknikstacken DOTS som är dataorienterad. Resultatet av mätningarna indikerar på att DOD använder mindre av hårdvaruresurserna vid prestandakrävande applikationer. Om applikationen ej är prestandakrävande märks dock ingen skillnad mellan de olika teknikerna vid fråga om processoranvändning. / Today, applications handle more and more data, which results in them becoming increasingly resource-intensive and requiring more of the hardware. Which in the long run may cause that the hardware must be replaced at regular intervals to be able to run the software in a way that is satisfactory for the user. This thesis investigates whether it is possible to get less resource-intensive applications by changing the design technology. The paper presents a comparison between object-oriented design (also known as object-oriented programming, OOP) and data-oriented design (DOD). This is performed by addressing the known advantages and disadvantages of each design technique and by measuring each technique in the matter of performance. What was considered to be the main advantages of OOP is the reuse of code, that the code is easy to maintain, security in the form of encapsulation and that the objects that are used reflect human reality. On the other hand, these advantages also contribute to what is considered to be the main disadvantage of OOP, namely that it is performance-intensive. When it comes to DOD, the main advantages are considered to be that it results in a more cache-friendly code that leads to fewer cache misses. DOD is also considered easier to parallelize the code compared to OOP. The disadvantage of DOD is that it is time consuming to learn and requires some practice. Though, DOD is very unknown which resulted in a narrow basis. Two simulations were developed in Unity, one of which uses the new technology stack DOTS, which is data-oriented. The results of the measurements indicate that DOD uses less of the hardware resources in performance-intensive applications. If the application is not performance-intensive, though, no difference is noticed between the different technologies when it comes to CPU-usage.

Cette thèse examine l’imagination des systèmes de mesure de la performance au sein de l’industrie pharmaceutique. Par une observation participante étendue dans une grande entreprise pharmaceutique et des entretiens dans cette industrie, les trois articles de cette thèse explorent les influences intra et extra-organisationnelles qui agissent sur la forme et les raisons des systèmes de rémunération que les sociétés pharmaceutiques utilisent pour leur force de vente. Le premier article considère que les systèmes comptables émergent d’un ensemble d’inscriptions dramatisées qui mettent en scène, encadrent et médiatisent l’interaction entre les différents acteurs, internes et externes à l’organisation, qui participent à la fabrication d’un algorithme de rémunération. Le deuxième article théorise de quelle manière moral imaginaries sont constitués en objets comptables et comment les instruments comptables agissent comme médiateur moral. Il présente les systèmes émergents de mesure de la performance en tant que dispositifs de calcul moral façonnés par les imaginaires moraux contrastés de concepteurs hétérogènes. Le troisième article se concentre sur la manière dont les systèmes de mesure de la performance émergent et se stabilisent dans le contexte des marchés, afin d'explorer les infrastructures comptables au niveau de l’industrie que permettent aux acteurs organisationnels de visualiser, rendre compte et agir sur le marché lorsque ce dernier est invisible à pour ses participants. Pour que les systèmes de mesure de la performance fonctionnent sur un marché, il est nécessaire d’avoir une collaboration au sein du secteur, des opacités construites et des processus de (de)commercialisation de l’identité des acteurs. / This thesis examines the field-level imagining of Performance Measurement Systems in the pharmaceutical sector. By means of an extended participant observation in a Big Pharma company and interviews in the pharmaceutical sector, the three articles of this thesis explore the intra- and extra-organizational influences that act upon the shape and rationales of the compensation systems pharmaceutical companies operate for their sales-force. The first article explores accounting systems as emerging from a set of dramatized inscriptions that stage, frame, and mediate interaction among the different actors, internal and external to the organization, that participate in the fabrication of a compensation algorithm. The second article theorizes in what way moral imaginaries are constituted into accounting objects, and how accounting acts as a moral mediator. It shows emergent performance measurement systems as moral calculating devices that are shaped by, and engage with, the contrasting moral imaginaries of heterogeneous designers. The third paper brings the concern with how performance measurement systems emerge and stabilize in the context of markets, to explore the field-level accounting infrastructures that enable organizational actors to visualize, account for, and act upon the market when the market is invisible to its participants. For performance measurement systems to work in a market, it is suggested, they require field-level collaboration, constructed opacities, and processes of marketization and de-marketization of actors’ identities.

[pt] Os sistemas de mensuração de desempenho buscam acompanhar o alcance dos objetivos estratégicos a partir de um conjunto de indicadores que suportem os processos de tomada de decisão. Várias iniciativas, entretanto, têm se mostrado ineficazes devido à subjetividade no desdobramento desses objetivos em indicadores. Métodos de business analytics vêm sendo utilizados para auxiliar esse desdobramento via análise de dados, com maior geração de valor para as organizações. O presente trabalho apresenta a aplicação das técnicas de Random Forest e Bayesian Belief Network para, respectivamente, selecionar indicadores e mapear suas relações em um estudo prático numa empresa do setor de transporte ferroviário de cargas, com foco no suporte ao indicador de disponibilidade de locomotivas. Para o processo de seleção de variáveis, observou-se que o algoritmo Variable Selection Using Random Forest obteve o melhor desempenho em acurácia e tempo de processamento. Na elaboração do mapa estratégico, a combinação do algoritmo Tabu Search com o critério estatístico Bayesian Information Criteria levou à escolha de um arranjo parcimonioso em suas relações, aderente à expectativa inicial associada ao critério estatístico utilizado. Foi observado um significativo vínculo entre a disponibilidade de locomotivas e indicadores operacionais da empresa em estudo, revelando o potencial de influência do modelo operacional nos resultados da disponibilidade. Verifica-se a oportunidade de emprego de técnicas de séries temporais para a previsão de desempenho a partir dos relacionamentos entre indicadores, bem como para aperfeiçoar a fase de seleção de variáveis, com a identificação de possíveis defasagens existentes nesses relacionamentos. / [en] Performance measurement systems seek to monitor the achievement of strategic objectives through a set of indicators that support decision-making processes. Several initiatives, however, have been shown to be ineffective due to the subjectivity in the unfolding of these objectives into indicators. Business analytics methods have been used to assist this deployment via data analysis, with greater value generation for organizations. The present work presents the application of Random Forest and Bayesian Belief Network techniques to, respectively, select indicators and map their relationships in a practical study in a company in the rail freight sector, with a focus on supporting the locomotive availability indicator. For the variable selection process, it was observed that the Variable Selection Using Random Forest algorithm obtained the best performance in accuracy and computation time. In the preparation of the strategic map, the combination of the Tabu Search algorithm with the Bayesian Information Criteria statistical criterion led to the choice of a parsimonious arrangement in its relations, adhering to the initial expectation associated with the statistical criterion used. A significant link was observed between the locomotive availability and operational indicators of the company under study, revealing the potential influence of the operational model on the availability results. There is an opportunity to use time series techniques to predict performance based on the relationships between indicators, as well as to improve the variable selection phase, with the identification of possible lags in these relationships

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The subject of this thesis is evaluation of company performance and based on acquired information formulation of suggestions for improvement. The theoretical part describes classic and modern indicators for measurment of company performance. In the practical parts there are an analysis of company performance and the results are compare with competitive and average in industry. Last part of this thesis is dedicated to suggestions for an improvment.